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“What do you mean?” I asked, startled.
“I don’t know. You’ve got your little way of moving, like every step’s its own puzzle to figure out. And those eyes of yours.”
“They’re the same as everyone else’s.”
“But they don’t see the same, do they? You’re always looking at things like you can see straight through them.”
Should I tell her that sometimes, in a way, I could? I knew her heart beat faster than it should. I knew she had an old healed rib fracture and that her left wrist had broken badly sometime in the past. I knew that all her drinking was killing her, and I knew she didn’t care.
“You remind me of my daughter a little,” she said.
“Jessamine?” I looked at her in surprise. I didn’t think I looked like her at all. Caleb and Sandra hardly ever talked about their daughter. I’d certainly never heard her mentioned so casually.
Sandra made a soft little noise at the sound of her name. “She saw things differently. Like this place. She loved it. She told me the house was lonely and it liked when she talked to it, and it did seem to get better—you couldn’t see them at all when she was born, just jagged cracks in the air, but they got clearer as she got older.”
She was talking about the figments, dancing around naming them the way everyone had to. “You should know,” I said, worried, “If you see her—the little girl, she—she looks like—”
Her mouth opened, her eyes widening. “Oh,” she said softly, realizing. She looked at me, and her gaze hardened. “She isn’t the first girl lost to this place, you know. There have been others.”
“Harrow’s girls,” I said. What did Sandra know?
“There’s always an explanation. A perfectly natural reason for a little girl to be dead. A storm. The flu. A heart attack,” Sandra said, a strange smile curling the corners of her lips. Her fingertipsrested precisely on her elbows as she examined me. “It’s a dangerous world for children, and no one asks questions. Jessamine was supposed to be safe. A weekend with her grandparents. I went to the spa the day my daughter died. I drank champagne and got a manicure—can you believe that?” She laughed, and the sound was like the shearing of ice.
I swallowed. I didn’t know what I could possibly say to offer comfort or sympathy—but then, she didn’t want sympathy, and she couldn’t be comforted. Her scars and her grief were all she had left.
“What do you think happened to them?” I asked instead, voice hoarse.
“I think that Harrow is a bottomless pit that exists only to devour anything that falls into it,” Sandra said. “And it has fed on this family for generations. Your mother knew enough to run. You should have stayed gone.”
I shuddered with the force of her grief. It had lodged inside her like a cancer, and it was killing her faster than the alcohol.
She left then, and by the time I got to brunch, Sandra was back to her usual self, sorrow walled off behind sarcasm and gin. She’d been wrong, I thought. Not that I should get away from Harrow—but that I’d ever had the chance.
—
When I got back to my room after brunch, Desmond was waiting for me.
“You look like crap,” he said as I staggered in.
I dropped onto the bed. “That’s all anyone says to me these days. I miss ‘hello.’ How was Switzerland?” I asked him.
“Cold and dark,” he said simply, and I got the sudden feeling he didn’t want to talk about it, like that part of his life belonged to him, and he didn’t want Harrow to encroach on it. And I guess I belonged to Harrow now. He cleared his throat. “I’m trying to convince my dad to get a job at the University of Hawai‘i or something, but he was talking about neutrinos and Antarctica, so I’ve got a bad feeling about it.”
“Maybe I’ll join him. Antarctica sounds almost far enough away from Harrow to feel safe,” I said with a groan.
He gave me a sympathetic look. “Mom said you’ve been sick.”
“I can’t seem to shake it,” I said. I felt like I’d run a marathon, not just nibbled at tiny sandwiches.
“I was going to show you some new pages from the journal, but if you’re too wiped...” He held up the journal, loose papers stuck into it where he’d translated sections.
I shoved myself upright. “No, no, I want to see,” I insisted.
He handed the journal over and sat at the desk. His knee jiggled while I paged through. Most of the new material was the sort of inscrutable nonsense that Nicholas loved. “I didn’t really touch it for a while after the folly,” Desmond admitted, looking guilty. “I was too freaked out. But I picked it up again last week.”
“I appreciate it,” I said.
“Look at the page with the red sticky note,” Desmond said, leaning forward to point. “I saw the name Mary a bunch, so I started there. I thought it might be relevant, given that...”
